WEB TECH + ROCK ANTHEMS Thanks to Harmonix’s policy of “tour leave,” IT guy Bryn Bennett (left, with the rest of the Bang Camaro line-up) can work part-time to accommodate his band’s heavy schedule.

Jessica Smith has spent years booking death-metal shows around Boston. On top of loads of meat-and-potatoes nights at O'Brien's in Allston and Dee Dee's in Quincy, two of her shows — Origin and Malevolent Creation — actually sold out the Middle East upstairs. You likely haven't heard of her, but she's playing one of those vital, unheralded roles in the music industry.

At her day job, she's a Web-release engineer — which means that when someone encounters a bug at the Web site, a crew of coders create a fix and she plugs it in. That might sound like the sort of thing that leads to iffy sick days and clandestine searches on Craigslist job boards during work hours. But her office doesn't quite have that effect on people.

Smith landed a job two years ago at Harmonix Music Systems, the Cambridge video-game company behind the Rock Band franchise and, prior to that, Guitar Hero. You may have seen the ad for Harmonix's upcoming Beatles game — it was playing on 100-foot screens behind Sir Paul at Fenway. Harmonix is staffed top to bottom by local musicians, from the dudes in the Luxury to the dancing guy in the Bosstones. As corporate cultures go, it's resolutely atypical.

"This is a job where I actually hate being sick and not getting to go in to work," says Smith. There's a band rehearsal space in the basement that anyone can use; one employee offers drum lessons. Wikipedia has a long list of all the musicians who work for the company. Workers can take "tour leave" the way most companies offer maternity leave.

On August 20, they're shifting the base of operations across the street to the Middle East downstairs for Harmonix Night, Smith's first attempt at booking a full-on kitchen-sink company rock show, where every outfit has members with desks at Harmonix. There's mega-indie-noodlers Thief Thief, and warp-speed grind dudes Abnormality. The headliners are rock-anthem gang Bang Camaro, who're led by Harmonix game coder Bryn Bennett.

This isn't the first-ever bill filled out by Harmonix bands, but it is the first in a room the size of the Middle East's downstairs, and it comes as part of a flurry of Harmonix-connected events across town, like the more experimental poetry/DJ/electronics show (dubbed "Oxytocin") at Enormous Room this past Monday.

I catch Bennett, who's working part-time thanks to Bang Camaro's heavy touring schedule, on the phone in his office. "The difference between this office and places I've worked before is huge. Not only can I come in and say something about Lightning Bolt and everyone in the office actually knows who that is, but [Harmonix illustrator] Brian Gibson is sitting right there, like, 'Oh yeah, that's my band.'"

Bang Camaro fight the business of rock It was January 6, 2009, on the set of The Late Show down in New York City, and Conan O'Brien just couldn't shut up about Bang Camaro. Even the normally stoic Max Weinberg admitted to being a fan.

Friends of E Last month, Central Square hosted a memorial party for the late Billy Ruane, who at 52 years old, pretty much everyone agreed, had lived a full, rich life. This Saturday, T.T. the Bear’s is once again the site of a show in someone’s memory.

Inventing the Future Has Boston found the new Eric Clapton? A shimmying, face-contorting successor to Yngwie Malmsteen? Not exactly.

Review: Buckethead, Wolff at Asylum Little is known about the masked maniac called Buckethead. According to his mythology, he was raised in a chicken coop next door to a drive-in theater, and the bucket he wears on his head contains cursed chicken bones that give him his supernatural guitar-shredding powers.

Review: Guitar Hero: Smash Hits When evaluating a new Guitar Hero — or any music-related game — it helps to picture a Venh Diagram consisting of three circles: "Good Songs," "Challenging Songs," and "Songs that are fun to play on plastic instruments."

Review: It Might Get Loud Some guitar teachers will tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to play the guitar. But Davis Guggenheim’s rousing new documentary, It Might Get Loud, reminds us that that’s not true at all.

INTERVIEW: TALKING WITH MISSION OF BURMA'S ROGER MILLER | January 18, 2012 This weekend (January 20-21) brings a two-night stand at Brighton Music Hall for post-punk godfathers Mission of Burma, who have somehow morphed into a band that's equal parts internationally renowned throwbacks and prolific local underdogs.

TRYING TO FIND NOW | January 04, 2012 William Gibson — the writer who famously coined the term "cyberpunk" and whose classic tech-punk novels like Neuromancer and The Difference Engine helped spawn a couple generations' worth of bleak, busted fantasies — is now on tour promoting his first collection of nonfiction.

DENGUE FEVER ADD ECCENTRICITY TO PSYCH POP | June 01, 2011 For all the kitsch and B-movie flair of Dengue Fever, there are still a few aspects of their obsession with Cambodian pop that they haven't put on record.